Have Good Writing Skills? Know Why

There may be an inherited element to writing good fiction, a new research has revealed.

There may be an inherited element to writing good fiction, a new research has revealed.

Researchers from Yale in the US and Moscow State University in Russia launched the study to see whether there was a scientific reason as to why well-known writers produced other authors, the Independent reported.

There are four generations of Waugh novelists – Arthur, sons Alec and Evelyn, Evelyn’s son Auberon, and Auberon’s daughter Daisy; Kingsley Amis and his son Martin; H G Wells and Rebecca West, and their son Anthony West.

“There are also the three venerable Bronte sisters, Henry and William James [the novelist and writer on psychology were brothers], the Cheevers [father, daughter and son], and the Ephrons [both parents were successful screenwriters, and four daughters who are also writers],” the researchers said.

“More currently, there are two bestselling mother-son pairs of mystery writers: Caroline and Charles Todd and Iris and Roy Johansen,” she said.

The study analysed the creative writing of 511 children aged between 8- 17 and 489 of their mothers and 326 fathers.

All the participants of the study were told to write stories on particular themes.

For children, the themes were “were I an elephant” and “were I invisible”; for adolescents “a time machine for an hour” and “visiting a witch”; and for adults “the world from an insect’s point of view” and “imagine who lives and what happens on a planet called Priumliava”.